John Crowe Ransom's "Land!," long thought to have been burned by its author, now available

The University of Notre Dame Press is proud to publish Land!: The Case for an Agrarian Economy (a Front Porch Republic book) by National Book Award winner John Crowe Ransom. Land! was long thought to have been burned by its author after he failed to find a publisher. Thankfully, the manuscript was discovered, and we are now able to read this unique and interesting contribution to the Southern Agrarian revival.

The accomplished poet and scholar John Crowe Ransom made profound contributions to twentieth-century American literature. As a teacher at Vanderbilt University he was also a leading member of the Southern Agrarian movement and a contributor to the movement’s manifesto I’ll Take My Stand. Ransom’s Land! is a previously unpublished work that unites Ransom’s poetic sensibilities with an examination of economics at the height of the Great Depression. The book is politically charged with Ransom’s aesthetic beliefs about literature and his agrarian interpretation of economics.

Jason Peters, in the Editor’s Note, provides a brief history of the discovery of the manuscript and its eventual publication more than eight decades after it was written.